Korea's Low Birthrate Problem and Working Conditions

I recently started working at a city bus company that is in the process of transitioning to a semi-public system. It was a favorable condition for analyzing both the quasi-public and private systems. I noticed the phenomenon of more and more young people trying to drive buses. That is very welcome. However, I feel a pang of sympathy for the senior drivers who had to grind their youth into poor working conditions all this time. On the other hand, I was able to find some clues regarding the low birthrate problem, and it made me think that not only the real estate issue but also the issue of working conditions is deeply interconnected with the low birthrate problem.

 

France is moving toward drastically reducing working hours and providing government subsidies. It is a direction that arises on the premise of strictly adhering to the significantly reduced working hours. Eastern countries such as Korea and Japan have a dull sense of the “lawfulness” of working conditions. It is thought to be because of the tradition of a culture of obedience to superiors. When discussing artificial intelligence, I began with a discussion of Japan’s black companies. Some also cite France’s working conditions as the basis for why the French economy is in trouble, but France should focus on its fiscal support for pensions and the trend of a shrinking working-age population, as is the case in Korea. After all, the older workforce cannot endure more than 35 hours a week.

 

A long time ago, when I was working in a factory, I wrote a column saying that the day would come when Korea would have to generalize the six-hour workweek. Of course, productivity improvement was a prerequisite, and that productivity improvement is now becoming widespread through the emergence of AI and the establishment of robotic systems. Of course, I believe that day will come, of course.

The Nation That Mortgaged Its Time

The Double Trap of Low Fertility Created by Labor Conditions

Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist

1. Clearing Away Two Myths

South Korea's response to its collapsing birth rate rests on two myths. The first is that the problem can be solved by simply spending more money. The second is that private tutoring costs (sagyoyuk) have made child-rearing unaffordable. Between 2006 and 2023, the government poured roughly 380 trillion won into low-fertility measures, yet the total fertility rate fell to 0.72. If the first myth were true, that much spending should have moved the needle. It has not, because the money was never aimed at the actual problem.

I have driven a city bus, operated a forklift, and taught at a cram school. What I saw on the ground were two traps that statistics rarely capture cleanly. The first is that labor itself confiscates the time a person needs to court, marry, and raise a child. The second is that the struggle to escape that labor takes the form of private tutoring, which in turn makes child-rearing genuinely more expensive. These are not two separate problems. They branch from the same root.

2. The First Trap — Labor That Confiscates Time

The issue is not how many hours a person works, but whether that person controls those hours. The industrial psychologist Robert Karasek laid out this distinction as early as 1979 [6]: high job demands are bearable when the worker has real discretion over how to meet them, but the combination of high demand and no discretion is the most damaging arrangement of all. Korean labor sits precisely in that worst-case combination.

When I drove a bus, the dispatch schedule was never mine. I could not decide when to use the bathroom, when to eat, or even when to go home. The statutory 52-hour workweek changes little in practice — not because the law goes unenforced, but because three walls stand at once: a culture in which leaving on time invites disapproval even within the legal limit, and a dual labor market in which choosing shorter hours means falling out of regular employment into low-paid, precarious work. With the law, the culture, and the market structure all working in the same direction, there is no way out.

Dating, marriage, and parenting all require one shared precondition: a promise to share predictable time with another person, or with a child. Keeping a date, picking a child up from daycare, dividing housework with a spouse — all of these depend on at least minimal control over one's own schedule. Once that precondition disappears, courtship and marriage stop being a matter of choice and become physically impossible.

Compounding this, as men's employment grows less secure and their control over working hours evaporates, the pool of what the American sociologist William Julius Wilson called "marriageable men" is structurally shrinking [7]. When women scrutinize a partner's economic stability, this is not selfishness. Given that women still shoulder the disproportionate burden of housework and caregiving after marriage, it is a rational demand for a minimum insurance against the risk they alone will carry. The problem is not that women's standards are too high; it is that the supply of men who meet those standards keeps falling. It is no coincidence that Korea's matchmaking industry has grown in a society where there is no longer time left over for dating. People increasingly outsource courtship itself to services that rank job and income into tiers and match accordingly. Romance has been subcontracted.

3. The Second Trap — Private Tutoring as Insurance, Not Delusion

The claim that private tutoring costs prevent people from having children is only half right. More precisely, private tutoring is not a parental delusion — it is a rational insurance policy imposed by the labor market.

Not long ago, a student from a top university took a part-time job at the factory where I worked. He quit within a month, saying, "I don't even want the money — I need to stay healthy." He could quit because he had another option: a prestigious credential. Someone without that credential cannot quit. Korea's employment reality is structured so that without a good academic pedigree, a person must endure work that breaks the body.

The Park Chung-hee government deliberately raised the social status of technical workers as a matter of national policy. But after the 1993 transition to civilian government, that trend reversed, and the old status hierarchy of scholar over farmer, artisan, and merchant (sa-nong-gong-sang) resurfaced. Technical and skilled labor were pushed back down, and academic credentials became the only ladder out. Private tutoring is precisely the investment required to climb that ladder. Parents are not overinvesting irrationally — the investment became rational because the labor market made a life without credentials unbearably harsh.

Policies that try to curb private tutoring spending by regulating cram schools or providing more information are therefore treating the symptom, not the cause. The real solution is to lower the academic-credential premium in the labor market itself — that is, to restore the wages and status of technical and skilled work so that a dignified life no longer requires a prestigious degree.

4. Where Did the 380 Trillion Won Go?

Viewed through these two traps — confiscated time and tutoring-as-insurance — the past two decades of low-fertility spending reveal exactly what the government missed.

Direct cash transfers, which made up 31.4% of the annual low-fertility budget in 2015, collapsed to 11.5% in 2016 [1]. As of 2019, Korea's family cash benefits amounted to just 0.32% of GDP, less than a third of the OECD average of 1.12% [2]. What surged instead was housing support, which grew eightfold between 2016 and 2020 and made up 44–45% of the annual budget by 2020–2022 [1]. Within that 380 trillion won figure, spending was also found in items with no direct bearing on childbirth or child-rearing at all — temple-stay program operations (about 70 billion won), scouting professional sports talent (2.2 billion won), and the Green Smart School renovation project (1.83 trillion won) [1].

The numbers say something simple. The 380 trillion won never squarely targeted either trap — neither the labor conditions that confiscate time nor the credential premium that drives tutoring competition. The money flowed instead to wherever the problem was easiest to avoid: housing, and programs unrelated to fertility altogether. For context, Statistics Korea's own 2024 social survey again found that the top reason unmarried young adults give for avoiding marriage is simply "lack of funds for marriage" [3] — even as direct cash support was precisely what the government had been cutting.

5. What Should Be Done

Giving people back their time is the right starting point, but the wrong method can backfire. France tried exactly the logic that "cutting working hours splits up jobs and lifts births" when it introduced the 35-hour workweek in 2000. The results were mixed. Government subsidies that offset employers' payroll costs produced some short-run employment gains [4], but firms responded to shorter hours by intensifying the pace of work to preserve output, and after 2007 the government began effectively reversing the policy under the slogan "work more, earn more" [5]. Cutting hours uniformly is not, by itself, the answer. What matters is not the quantity of time but the individual's control over it.

Policy should therefore move in three directions. First, statutory working hours must be enforced in practice, and the culture of disapproval toward those who decline overtime must be institutionally dismantled, so that refusing overtime carries no penalty. Second, the divide between regular and non-regular employment must be narrowed, so that choosing fewer hours does not mean falling into precarity. Third, the wages and social status of technical and skilled labor must be restored, breaking the structure in which academic credentials are the only ladder to survival — only then does the need for tutoring-as-insurance itself recede. Only once these three conditions are in place can the government's budget be redirected fully toward direct cash support and childcare infrastructure, instead of housing programs and unrelated spending.

6. Conclusion

Korea's low birth rate will not be solved by handing out more money. It is a doubly locked trap: labor strips people of sovereignty over their own time, and the struggle to reclaim that time drives them into another form of exploitation — the tutoring arms race. The 380 trillion won proves exactly one thing: no amount of money matters if it never aims at the real target. Otherwise it is no different from pouring water into a leaking jar.

 

참고문헌 / References

[1] 일요신문. (2024). "380조 원 써서 '0.72명'…저출산 예산 어디로 갔나." https://www.ilyo.co.kr/?ac=article_view&entry_id=470517

[2] OECD. (2024). Korea's Unborn Future. OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 1824. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/10/korea-s-unborn-future_5fef94e8/75aa749c-en.pdf

[3] SBS Biz. (2024). "[2024 사회조사] '돈 없어서 결혼 못해요'…결혼 기피 이유 TOP3는?" https://biz.sbs.co.kr/article/20000201186

[4] Askenazy, P. (2007). A Primer on the 35-Hour Workweek in France, 1997–2007. IZA Discussion Paper No. 3402. https://docs.iza.org/dp3402.pdf

[5] Estevão, M., & Sá, F. (2006). Are the French Happy with the 35-Hour Workweek? IZA Discussion Paper No. 2459. https://docs.iza.org/dp2459.pdf

[6] Karasek, R. A. (1979). Job Demands, Job Decision Latitude, and Mental Strain: Implications for Job Redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285–308.

[7] Wilson, W. J. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. University of Chicago Press.